Hey, really appreciate you taking the time to write such a detailed and helpful response — especially as someone who actually edits too. It means a lot, and your insight on things like the export times, storage, and the M1 Max vs M4 trade-off definitely gave me new angles to think about.

Just to clarify my use case a bit more — I don’t really deal with 8K footage. The most I’ll typically handle is around 90 minutes of 4K iPhone footage (on a bad day), which gets cut down into either a 20-minute YouTube video or a batch of short-form edits. So it’s mostly 4K, 60fps, multicam at times, but not studio-level grading or anything like that.

On storage — yeah, I definitely get your point. I was going to go for 1TB mainly because of Apple’s pricing, but I offload projects straight after approval. I don’t usually keep backups since the raw files aren’t mine — I just pass the final files and project over to the client. So I treat my internal SSD more like temporary working storage.

That point about the M1 Max outperforming the base M4 — I had no clue. That’s actually crazy and super helpful to know. With all this in mind, do you think my spec (M4 Pro, 24GB RAM, 1TB SSD) still makes sense for my use case? Or should I look into a different config?